Don’t ask me to track what sequence of thoughts led to my pondering this, but recently I was thinking about how I might talk about alcohol to kids. It’s an interesting thought experiment because you have to dumb it down a bit for kids to understand, but actually, dumbing it down a bit is super helpful for our adult brains to understand it better too. This is how I ended up thinking about it:
Alcohol doesn’t taste very good. You probably wouldn’t like it.
So why would anyone drink it?
Well, when you’re a kid, your brain is a bit smaller and there’s not as much stuff in it. When you grow up, you have a lot more stuff in your brain. It’s good to have all that stuff up there, but it makes it harder to do some things like make friends and have fun.
What alcohol does is it quiets down all that stuff going on in grown ups’ brains. It makes us dumber, but it also lets us make friends and play games and stuff easier.
Now, when you’re about 12 until you’re about 16, 90% of that stuff just shows up in your head kind of suddenly. And it can be scary until you get used to it. So a lot of people start to like alcohol between the ages of 12 and 16 because it quiets that stuff down so you don’t have to deal with it. But it never goes away for the rest of your life, so you can’t hide from it.
It’s part of you. You can’t try to kill part of yourself and expect the rest of you to be okay. I promise you if you talk about it with people who love you, you will get used to it and you can start using all the extra stuff because it’s super useful.
And anyway, that’s why you’re not allowed to drink until you’re 18 or 21.
Once you’re grown up, and once you’re used to having more stuff in your head, you can use alcohol every once in a while for a good reason instead of all the time for a bad reason.
